Detective Fiction and Modernity a Study of Dorothy L

DETECTIVE FICTION AND MODERNITY A STUDY OF DOROTHY L. SAYERS AND CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English By Bridget R. Harrington, B.A. Washington, DC August 25, 2008 To my family, and especially Reid, the newest member. For all of your love and support. Endless thanks, Bridget Harrington Rector ii Copyright 2008 by Bridget R. Harrington All Rights Reserved iii CONTENTS Introduction . .1 Chapter One Genre and Context . .4 Chapter Two Conventions and Form . .34 Chapter Three Reading The Corpse with a Sunburned Face and The Six Queer Things as Modern Texts. .56 Appendix A: Synopsis of The Corpse with a Sunburned Face. 86 Appendix B: Synopsis of The Six Queer Things . 90 iv INTRODUCTION Detective fiction provides a unique field for discussion. Because it can be analyzed in terms of its adherence to or departure from a set of conventions, it can be traced in its various permutations through large periods of time, revealing how social and cultural influences shape the changes in the genre. The wheel is not being reinvented, so we can assess some of the subtle tweaks that are made to the original formula. At the same time, a danger also lies in criticizing an entire genre, as its apparent uniformity makes it too easy to make sweeping generalizations. By examining two authors, Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) and Christopher Caudwell (1907-1937), I explore some of their surprising commonalities, and the reasons for such, and also examine how two very similar books can also vary widely in their message. The juxtaposition of the canonical novels of Sayers with the virtually unknown and out-of- print detective fiction of Caudwell1 opens up a space in which can be examined the connection of popular fiction to a turbulent and conflicted era. Both Sayers and 1 Christopher Caudwell actually wrote his genre fiction under his real name, Christopher St. John Sprigg, and used Caudwell as a pseudonym for his Marxist criticism. As an indication of his relative popularity in both areas, he is known critically only by his pseudonym. Therefore, even though his detective fiction was published under the name St. John Sprigg, for ease of reference I will refer to him as Caudwell throughout this text. 1 Caudwell wrote “serious” works as well as more lucrative detective novels, but while Sayers’s work on Dante and theology has been largely forgotten, Caudwell is now known almost exclusively for his connection to the development of British Marxism through his works Illusion and Reality (1937) and Studies in a Dying Culture (1938).2 Though Sayers challenges the genre in her own ways, I ultimately show how Caudwell uses the form of the genre to more fully explore the experience of modernity. It is difficult to navigate between criticism of detective fiction and of high modernism - few, like Jon Thompson--attempt to recognize that separating the two into "high" and "low" or other measurements reflecting relative aesthetic merit, prevents a fuller understanding of both. If we acknowledge that both come out of the same social situation and are read by the same people (though obviously det. fiction has wider audience) it begins to seem overly essentialist to deny the connection. We see this struggle even on the level of the individual writer—for instance in how critics do not even try to reconcile Caudwell's "serious" criticism with his detective fiction. For purposes of this project, I consider how the development of detective fiction, like that of its coincident “high” modern texts, largely connects to the social context in which it arose. George Orwell bluntly stated, “a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot” (2), but in some sense this ignores the fact that the major public events of the time shape art and 2 These works, along with several other pieces of criticism, were published posthumously following Caudwell’s tragic death in the Spanish Civil War at the age of 30. 2 entertainment (under which category detective fiction falls of course a vexed question), whether those events are explicitly acknowledged or not. Following a discussion of the genre as a whole, I focus on the connected field of culture as it shapes, and is shaped by, detective fiction. Valentine Cunningham’s very insightful and thorough study on British Writers of the 30s, describes his task as an intellectual historian as using facts and figures to decode “a connected field, a whole text, a set of diverse signs adding up, more or less, to a single semiotic” (2) and the attempt to “grapple with as much of the components of that scene, that text, as he can” (2). In some way, I see this as my project here. I will attempt to take into account some of the most significant social changes and historical events that take place around the development of detective fiction in the 20s and 30s, paying attention to its relationship to “high” modernism, the connections to a wide reading public, and also how the genre functions as part of the field, and engenders change within it, focusing specifically on the texts of Sayers and Caudwell. Finally, I will read two of Caudwell’s most controversial novels, The Corpse with the Sunburned Face (1935) and The Six Queer Things (1937), in light of these analyses. 3 CHAPTER ONE GENRE AND CONTEXT Though many differences in opinion arise in the world of detective fiction criticism, a general consensus can be found as to the origins of the genre. The changing social conditions and development of the Detective Department in London in 1842 created an audience able to even imagine a detective as a hero. As Dennis Porter notes, prior to these mid-nineteenth century shifts, the delinquent or bandit (à la Robin Hood) was the most popular hero in British popular literature, but following police reforms, “not only did the police themselves appear relatively efficient and free from corruption, a more graduated system of punishments and a more discreet application of severer forms of punishment also reconciled greater numbers of people to the law and its agencies” (149). As Dorothy Sayers notes in her “Introduction” to the Omnibus of Crime, “though crime stories might, and did, flourish, the detective-story proper could not do so until public sympathy had veered round to the side of law and order” (55). One major distinction between the very earliest forms of crime fiction and the formal detective story can be seen in the difference between treatments of crime in Dickens and Poe. For Dickens, crime is a societal problem (an issue that I will return to in the next section), and, as Porter notes, “What Dickens suggests most memorably to 4 his middle- and lower-middle class public is the evil of criminal society on the one hand, and on the other, the complicity of established society in expanding it by the means of its social doctrines, laws, and institutions” (21). For Dickens, the criminals are not glamorous, but rather, “mostly ordinary, unheroic people for whom crime is an alternative to pauperism” (Porter, 16), whose crimes clearly stem from their desperate social conditions. The transition that occurs from this model to Edgar Allen Poe’s seminal detective stories, involves what Porter calls, “a fundamental shift in content and point of view from the commission of crime and the criminal to the adventure of explaining crime and pursuing its perpetrator” (24). This prioritizing of the character of the detective, and the retrospective nature of a work that begins with a crime and moves backwards, rather than building up an understanding of motive, provides the foundation for detective fiction written in the decades to follow. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), Poe sets out conventions of the genre that persist even to the present day. The story serves as a model that, if not followed, must be at least consciously resisted and acknowledged. Sayers notes, “we have the formula of the eccentric and brilliant private detective whose doings are chronicled by an admiring and thick-headed friend” (57), and she observes in Poe the origins of many of the genre’s most infamous ‘tricks’: the locked room mystery, the wrongly suspected man, and the solution by unexpected means. Julian Symons even more clearly identifies Poe as “the undisputed father of the detective story” (35), recognizing that “almost every later variation of plot in the detective story can be found 5 in the five short stories he wrote” (35). He notes, however, that though Poe may have originated these plots, “their development in Britain shows how well the detective story was suited to the emotional needs of a growing class” identified as “a middle class with increasing leisure” (42). The wild popularity of the genre in Britain brings us, of course, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the name nearly synonymous with detective fiction. Symons explores the almost mythic coming together of elements here: the form, i.e. a story of detection based on clues, the hero, an amateur detective who privileged empiricism and rationalism, and the medium, the popular periodical, “selling at a low price and publishing plenty of fiction and non-fiction which, although always light and mostly trivial, was conceived on a level above the penny dreadful and dime novel” (62). Essential to this model as well was the form of the short story, which focused on the crime and its solution without undue attention to characterization.

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